Why exactly is the U.S. in Niger?

An honor guard escorts the casket of Army Sgt. La David Johnson during his burial service at the Memorial Gardens East cemetery on Oct. 21, 2017, in Hollywood, Fla.

An honor guard escorts the casket of Army Sgt. La David Johnson during his burial service at the Memorial Gardens East cemetery on Oct. 21, 2017, in Hollywood, Fla. (Gaston De Cardenas / AFP/Getty Images)

Will BunchTribune Content Agency

Myeshia Johnson has a lot of questions — really good questions, actually — about why her husband, U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson, a member of an elite Special Forces unit, and three of his American comrades were killed during a murky military mission in the central African nation of Niger earlier this month.

“I don't know how he got killed, where he got killed or anything,” Johnson, who is six months pregnant with her late husband's child, said in a recent interview with ABC News. “I don't know that part. They never told me, and that's what I've been trying to find out since Day One, since Oct. 4.”

What's appalling is that the powerful people who should be able to answer these simple questions seem to be completely clueless — and not just about what happened in the town of Tongo Tongo on that fateful day. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee and the most influential member of Congress on defense issues, said the Trump administration has given him few details about what happened in Niger, while other key senators — including Democrats Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Republican Lindsey Graham — made the more shocking admission that, in Graham's words, they “had no idea ” that there are more than 800 U.S. troops in Niger. Late Monday afternoon, the nation's top uniformed officer, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a muddled news conference that raised more questions about the deadly events of Oct. 4 than were answered and also failed to offer a rousing defense of this broader mission halfway around the world.

There's one question that no one has adequately answered — the most important one of all.

Why are we in Niger?

More broadly, what is the explanation and the broader strategy behind the ever-expanding U.S. military presence in Africa, where an umbrella of American troops now spreads from parts of Somalia, a largely lawless nation that has famously caused America heartbreak in the past, to Djibouti (where we have a large permanent base), Cameroon and elsewhere, with a growing air force of unmanned drones that can spy on various African militias or villages or rain down weapons if needs be — none of this debated by a largely in-the-dark American public, and none of this directly authorized by Congress, which is supposed to share in the power to wage war?

It's a serious, life-or-death question that calls for thoughtful answers by serious people. That conversation should start with this: Under what authority are some 6,000 U.S. troops (a level of strength that America didn't hit in Vietnam until midway through the John F. Kennedy administration) and our fleet of flying death robots now serving in Africa? The pat answer that you'd get from the Pentagon and previously from the Obama administration (which carried out a good bit of our military expansion in Africa, with little or no fanfare) and now the Trump administration would be the near-unanimous 2001 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force, which launched what used to be called “the war on terror ” and is now increasingly called our “ forever wars.”

That resolution, of course, only really addressed the original al-Qaida group that was led by the wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden, and which was well-organized and well-funded and showed not only on 9/11 but in lesser operations like the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that it was a threat to Americans at home and abroad.

That was 16 years ago this autumn. Now, bin Laden is dead, with his original group barely existent, and it's been replaced by various coalitions of bad actors and wanna-be warlords who seem a lot less capable of striking U.S. citizens — until we send our troops into their remote villages on military missions.

Obama did publicly announce in 2013 that he was sending 100 U.S. troops to Niger. In failing to address a militaristic U.S. policy that sees every problem around the globe as a nail to be pounded by an $800 Pentagon hammer, Obama passed the torch to the reckless President Donald Trump, who has given the generals carte blanche to expand the front line and the deadliness of our tactics; the number of innocent civilians killed by the American military has skyrocketed since January, and an expanded role for the Pentagon — from sending more troops into the sinkhole that is Afghanistan to putting America's nuclear bombers on 24-hour alert for the first time since the end of the Cold War — has become a dominant theme of Trump's America.

And yet with all these operations all over the globe for so many years — longer than a typical high school sophomore has been alive — do we feel any safer? And how can we afford this — Congress recently showered the Pentagon with a whopping $700 billion, more even than Trump had asked for — when our trains and our train tracks are constantly breaking down, ridiculous college costs are bankrupting our youth and health care for the working class is treated like a luxury?

If and when the despicable widow-bashing ever stops and after the Pentagon gets its story straight about what happened in Tongo Tongo, Trump — or maybe Defense Secretary James Mattis, who comes off as a lot more trustworthy and honest — should go on national TV with a sweeping address that, while not compromising military tactics, should answer these three seemingly simple questions. Why are we in Niger? Why are we in Africa? In what nations is the U.S. military — more than 16 years after the 9/11 attacks — still waging war against terrorism, and what is the strategy and perceived end dates of these conflicts?

Then, that strategy needs to be written down in a new AUMF bill that needs to be sent to Congress and properly debated — not for a few hours but for several weeks, with committee hearings and expert testimony — and then voted up or down. Or, better yet, amended to an anti-terrorism policy that actually makes sense. That's the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it going down when it came to the United States fighting wars.

While I've tried to ignore most of the back-and-forth, I was struck by Trump's apparent comment in his now-infamous phone call with Myeshia Johnson, in which he apparently said that her late husband “ knew what he signed up for.” Many said that was insensitive, but we're missing the broader point. La David Johnson didn't know what he signed up for in Niger. None of us does. That needs to change right away.

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Will Bunch is a senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the author of its political blog called "Attytood.”